Composable SDLC Automation with Skills (Scripts, Hooks, and Rules)

On April 22, 2026 I gave a 25-minute talk at AI Indy walking through how skills, hooks, CLAUDE.md rules, and GitHub Actions compose into a fully automated software development lifecycle — from issue to merged PR.

The talk uses my personal setup as a live case study: skills that encode repeatable workflows, hooks that trigger automatically on events, CLAUDE.md files that give Claude persistent project context, and GitHub Actions that close the loop on CI/CD.

Recording

The Core Idea

Each primitive is simple on its own. The power comes from composing them:

• Skills — reusable slash commands that encode multi-step workflows
• Hooks — shell commands that fire on Claude Code lifecycle events
• CLAUDE.md — persistent context and rules scoped to project, directory, or user
• GitHub Actions — the outer automation loop that hands off to agents

Together they form a composable SDLC automation stack where one product builder can operate at a pace that previously required a full team.

Slides

You can navigate the full slide deck below, or open the slides directly.

Use arrow keys or click the arrows inside the deck to navigate. Hit F for fullscreen.

The slide source and example configs are available on GitHub: craigsturgis/aise-sdlc-presentation.

Results in Practice

This stack is what enabled the pace detailed in 540 Issues. 745 PRs. One Builder. 60 Days. — the composable automation layer is what made that kind of output sustainable for a single product builder.